CHOOSING A HOLISTIC APPROACH

CHOOSING A HOLISTIC APPROACH

At Vantage Advisors, LLC in St. George, Utah, the company generally caters to clients who have a high level of complexity in their financial lives. Fiscally a person may have several streams of wealth, multiple business entities and partnerships, or capital obligations related to a spouse or children. One factor remains. Regardless of financial situation, Vantage Advisors cares about its clients.

In an industry swarming with com­panies who could all boast about their wealth management expertise, Vantage prides itself not only on its fine tuning of the portfolios, but rather on its profusion of empathy. Vantage has a strong team of professional CPAs on staff that helps diversify the firm’s holistic approach to financial advising. Howev­er, the single biggest thing making this company stand out from its competitors, is an approach that Greg Kemp, CEO of Vantage Advisors wanted to try long before he founded the firm.

“We’ve learned over time that there is a price to pay when you focus on some­thing, and that price is the loss of your peripheral vision,” says Kemp, adding that companies often zero in on the ebbs and flows of the financial market, rather than client feelings. “In the profession that we are working in, there are people who are very, very focused – almost to the point of excluding everything else. And it really compromises their ability to give holistic advice.”

“We can’t offer the best advice if we don’t own the problem, and we can’t own the problem without empathy,” he adds. “We need to see it through our client’s prism.”

Kemp acknowledges that the Vantage team assesses everything from an indi­vidual’s asset portfolio, to financial goals and fears, family background – even personality. In turn, Vantage is able to take its knowledge to create customized solutions.

“Everybody says they do that,” Kemp argues. “But, we really work hard to stay wide, and to have some depth also. And these aren’t just talking points – it’s got to be real.”

Being “real” is more important than ever. Though the digital age has given advisors a bigger set of tools, it is also beginning to take the “human” out of the equation. In addition to the rise of robo-advising services, Kemp believes the 24/7 news environment often unnecessarily escalates clients’ concerns.

At other companies, calls to advisors who could quiet market murmurs too often go unanswered.

In fact, Kemp says that the lack of advisor availability happens to be new clients’ No. 1 complaint about their previous wealth management company. Vantage has made it their mission to be available and present – and to help clients keep things in perspective.

“We really admire some of the soft­ware we’ve seen, but at the end of the day it’s still an algorithm,” he said, emphasizing, “It can’t pick up on the nu­ances that a face-to-face [meeting] with a human being does. That’s how we talk about customizing solutions unique to an individual.”